We don’t value the opportunities we have to communicate with other people.
This is true of many everyday interactions, and it becomes increasingly clear when someone steps up in front of a large group. Frequently, a person goes up with no outline, no notes, no hard plan for what they’ll say and how. Instead, they riff and improvise, feeling it out as they go.
I imagine this was less prevalent when people relied on phone calls, written letters, and face-to-face meetings. In today’s world, the centrality of social media and the ease of texting have made our communication almost entirely informal, colloquial, and sporadic. The discipline that it takes to carefully craft a message, to put in work with planning steps, drafts, and multiple iterations, seems to be fading, and with it, eloquence and creativity fade, too.
When delivering a message -- or, really, when communicating in any way -- technology should not become a crutch, but rather an aid; technology should not be a shortcut, but rather a supplement. I don’t want you to read me slides or to project an obligatory, visually uninteresting powerpoint. I don’t want you to send me an email that doesn’t have a salutation and signature, that is lacking punctuation, that has spelling and syntax errors. I don’t want you to deliver a first draft when it’s time for your final copy.
Take the time to use technology to aid and strengthen your message. Slides should have bullets that capture the main points of your talk and selected quotes that need to be read and reread to underscore their importance. The slides’ format, style, and appearance should utilize font, layout, graphics, images, and video clips to strengthen the delivery of your message. And their content should be clean and carefully arranged.
And perhaps most importantly: most of us shouldn’t be giving speeches off the top of our heads. While there’s something relatable and natural about a speaker who doesn’t use a script, the amount of people who can effectively speak in that fashion is small. Referring to notes or an outline intermittently, or even confidently reading prepared remarks, isn’t a sign of weakness but a sign of your preparation.
Then, when you’ve delivered your message, take it easy with the “let me know” statements. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Let me know if you have any questions. Let me know if you need anything. With so many ways to contact each other -- face-to-face, phone calls, texts, emails, social media -- we should stop relying so much on passivity and use our communication networks to be proactive. I’ll never forget a young woman sharing her depression and feelings of disconnection to fellow Kairos retreat alums; knowing the onslaught of passive offers that would follow, our chaplain challenged students to explicitly reach out to her in the days following the meeting, and many did. Follow-up with people personally rather than waiting for follow-up to come to you.
I think this whole ball of wax comes down how we don’t really value others’ time and attention. We detest when others waste our time, but then we perpetuate lazy norms in ourselves that wastes theirs. For whatever reason, as listeners and consumers, we’ve become terrible audiences. The benefit of the doubt that used to be all-but-guaranteed to someone who is talking to us, let alone who is also an authority figure, seems to have evaporated. Instead, we assume that we need not give our undivided attention, often feeling it instead has to be earned. We check out easily and not-so-covertly dick around on our phones or “work” on our laptops.
A simple challenge is the Golden Rule turn-around -- is the indifference or inattentiveness you pay to the speaker what you’d want from them if you were the one speaking? It’s frustrating to be the one to break the norm of distracting oneself in boredom; it takes one person going against the grain to start turning the tide back to dignified attention.
But our technology, social media, and connectivity make it more complicated than this. I think we’re getting dangerously high thresholds for what we consider engaging or interesting.
When I scroll Twitter, I might spend ten minutes and scroll through or past hundreds of tweets while only stopping to look at a few closely, to blow up an image or click through to an article that I may or may not fully read. When I watch TV, I can choose from dozens of channels, a huge array of Netflix offerings, or the bajillion things in the OnDemand menu. When I listen to music, I have my iTunes stash, Spotify streams and playlists, or any song I can ever imagine via Google and YouTube. We can endlessly curate anything and everything that we could want to consume. We are virtually unlimited in our control.
As a result, I think we struggle when put in a position where we’re “made” to pay attention to someone or something -- a presentation at a work conference, a demonstration on a plane by flight attendants, or even the Word and Sacrament of our Mass. We have become so used to complete curation of our consumption that we feel imposed upon if we’re not in a position of control. Even if we choose to go to Mass, a droll lector or a droning preacher or a traditional choir hymn that don’t fit our personal taste likely will not grab us.
I am not here to eviscerate social media and technology, which I love and use and struggle doggedly to moderate. I have long felt that my call in ministry is to call attention to the tensions and invite those with whom I work to confront that friction. So here we have it: amazing and virtually endless accessibility to communication and information and the need to value one’s own as well as others’ time and attention.
Utilize technology as an aid and complement. Value your interactions with others. Pay attention generously.
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